Better than human? What’s next for Jeopardy! computer

A bright future awaits computer system Watson now that it has shown it can compete with previous winners of the complicated US quiz

A MEDICAL robot; a Google-killer; a financial adviser; a tool for trawling legal documents; an aide for the intelligence services.

These are just some of the careers that could be in store for Watson, a supercomputer created by IBM which this week challenged human knowledge and intelligence in a three-part special edition of the US quiz Jeopardy!.

As New Scientist went to press, the outcome of the pre-recorded final was still a carefully guarded secret. But however it performs, the fact that a machine is able to compete on Jeopardy! “is a remarkable achievement”, says Boris Katz, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When IBM first suggested a Jeopardy! machine four years ago, many AI researchers were doubtful the company would succeed. Computers are great at following clearly defined rules, but Jeopardy! questions can involve puns and clues-within-clues, and cover a vast range of topics, from science to pop culture. The show demands an encyclopedic knowledge, and Watson is up against the two most successful players ever to appear on Jeopardy!.

Instead of creating new algorithms to allow Watson to understand Jeopardy!‘s complex questions, IBM’s team threw everything they already had at the problem. The result is a system that runs all the best existing algorithms for understanding and answering questions.

Led by David Ferrucci, the team also gave their machine a huge memory, which they loaded with 200 million pages

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